America's Talking - Federal Scholarship Program Under Fire for Alleged Bias Against Conservatives

Episode Date: May 25, 2024

Lawmakers have threatened to revoke the appropriations for a federally-funded scholarship program that an audit found favors liberally leaning students over conservatives by a ratio of 10 to 1. The Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation was established in the 1970s to award scholarships to students who “demonstrate outstanding potential for and who plan to pursue a career in public service.” An audit of those scholarships performed by the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, though, reported strong liberal bias at the taxpayer-funded foundation. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAlipp, chief content officer at Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire service. We are recording this on Thursday, May 23rd. Republican lawmakers and Congress have threatened to revoke the appropriations for a federally funded scholarship program that Anodd found favors liberal-leaning students over conservatives by a ratio of 10 to 1. The HeiS. Truman Scholarship Foundation was established in the 70s. to award scholarships to students who, quote, demonstrate outstanding potential for and who plan to pursue a career in public service.

An audit of those scholarships reported strong liberal bias at the Taxpayer Funded Foundation. Joining me to discuss this is Casey Harper, Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief for the Center Square. Casey, you wrote about this audit this week at thecentersquare.com. Tell us more. Yeah, I mean, what we found with this audit is that a federally, you know, established taxpayer-funded program has been biased against conservatives for a long time, right? This program is decades old. It's meant to take some of the best and brightest students and help pay their way to go on and do great things, right? Sounds like a great plan, of course,

established in the 1970s. But like many things in the federal government in recent years, it has become almost entirely one-sided on the side, especially of a sort of woke-esque agenda, right? And so when you look as part of the nomination or process, as part of the acceptance process, these students have to put forward, you know, projects that they would work on or things that they're passionate about. And when you look at the projects they put forward and the projects that are selected, guess what's not on the list? Second Amendment rights. It doesn't quite make the list as things that the Harriest Truman Scholarship Foundation taxpayer funded is excited enough.

to pick a student for. Pro-life issues never quite makes the list as something that, you know, this federally funded program is excited about. But you can imagine the buffet of DEI issues about race and gender and sexuality. And, of course, those are an abundance on these kind of programs. And so this is just for me, Dan, this is the latest and an ongoing series of that I've been covering of these little, known federal programs that have been almost entirely institutionally captured by the most kind of liberal bureaucrats and they're funneling the money in the way they see fit. I've covered

so many different smaller agencies or smaller programs like this where there's just a few people running it because it's not, it's not the Department of Education as a whole. Of course, that is bias as well. But there's these little siloed things that Congress appropriated money for long ago and I kind of forgot about. And they have just become part of this machine within the federal government that is entirely all in on DEI, all in on the most liberal, even sometimes communistic ideas. And it's just shelling out those taxpayers every year to that end. And so this is just another example. AEI did this audit, which is a right-leaning group. And then, you know, it got the attention of lawmakers, as you said, and they're threatening to revoke funding. And so, you know,

whether they can actually do that or not, it depends on how this November elections go. But it's definitely gotten to that attention where lawmakers are paying attention. And the numbers are obvious. It's all right there. And in response to this audit, Republican members of Congress essentially demanded answers to the from the Foundation's executive secretary, Terry Babcock Loomish. We've seen members of Congress, particularly on the Republican side, demand answers from the Biden administration, on a wide number of topics. Oftentimes they don't get a response. Of course, these GOP members of Congress are threatening to withhold funding of it,

but because Congress has evenly divided the likelihood of both chambers passing that, passing something like that, or essentially pulling the funding from it, it's unlikely. Let's put it that way. Do you agree? Yeah, I agree. and I understand the kind of pessimism on these kind of letters. But I think this is an exception, not that something is going to get passed in the next two months to address this issue, but

this is a, this is something that Congress could easily do something about. This is a, this is the one or two sentences in an appropriations bill kind of problem. And so I really think that when the time comes, they really could address this. Also, there are, the board has Republicans on, on the board of this group. I think they probably just weren't paying attention. But, you know, Kay Granger, who's a Republican, congresswoman out of Texas. It's not the most conservative member, but, you know, she's a Republican.

You know, there's a Republican senator on the committee. And so there are, there are Republicans on the board of this organization. Of course, there's plenty of Democrats, too, including Biden's Department of Education Secretary. But I think there's enough Republicans on this board that this story is not getting enough attention that they can bring it and bring some correction and just even this out.

If the board isn't able to do it, then maybe one or two lines in an appropriation. So there are other levers besides Biden himself. I agree. Biden himself or the administration probably isn't going to do much to fix this. But maybe the board, which is supposedly bipartisan, and if that doesn't work, then it wouldn't take much to add a sentence or two to appropriations to straighten this program out. Thank you for that clarification. Casey, let me just very briefly change the topic, a related topic, but President Biden this week, continued his efforts to transfer student loan debt, college student loan debt to taxpayers.

What happened this week with that? Yeah, we talk about ongoing trends. We saw that President Joe Biden announced this week. He was, you know, he calls it canceling, which is interesting word choice, canceling $7.7 billion in student debt for 160,000 Americans. You used the word transfer, which, you know, you could argue is a better word because it's not like that. That debt just disappears. That debt was owed to U.S. taxpayers. It costs U.S. taxpayers money.

And, of course, we're already nearing $35 trillion in U.S. debt. But this isn't the first time that we've talked about this on this podcast and or written about it at thecenter square.com. Biden is, you know, month after month, finding ways to either expand federal programs or kind of slightly change the meaning or scope of them to forgive more. student debt. And he's just kind of doing this steady drip approach to keep it in the news. Of course, he tried to do a much bigger, wide-reaching student loan forgiveness of $10,000. But the Supreme Court shot that down because he tried to take a small clause and a totally

unrelated congressional bill and expand it to the whole country and the Supreme Court. It was like, you can't do that. But so anyway, so this is another round of cancellation, over $7 billion. I think we can probably expect more. I mean, in April, they did the same thing. I think it was about $7.5 billion for nearly 300,000 borrowers. This is just the latest example. But this has a real taxpayer implication, Dan, as we always talk about, because ultimately taxpayers foot the bill for these decisions. Yeah. And of course, with Biden trailing Trump in the polls, Republicans say it's really, it's an election interference-related policy matter saying that Biden is trying to essentially buy the votes of these folks who's, who's, uh,

student loans, he wants to forgive. But we'll save that for another day, Casey. Thank you for joining us today. Listeners can keep up with his story and more at thecentersquare.com.